In the 11 years I lived in Washington DC, from the mid '90s to the mid 2000s, I attended one city-wide town hall. Just one. At that meeting, our bow-tied and technocratic then-mayor, Anthony Williams, got up on stage at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library downtown and proceeded to have abuse and invective hurled at him for the next several hours. Mayor Tony, as we liked to call him, stayed fairly straight-faced throughout the session. When it was done, we had vented, he had listened. It felt like participatory democracy, but was it? Did what we had to say change how one bit of how the mayor did his job when he headed back to city hall? I was pretty sure it hadn't. And that's a big reason I never went to a second town hall.

The question of how effective our attempts at influencing power from outside the system have been and will be has been on my mind a lot lately. And so it was on my mind when Melbourne, Australia's attempt to form a city plan by wiki was celebrated during yesterday's OneWebDay.

Comedian, activist, Obama supporter, and Jack & Jill Politics blogger Baratunde Thurston has launched The Voter Suppression Wiki. The freely-editable online hub aims to coordinate information and activism around any foul play and/or mess ups that might make election '08 less than on the level; When you want to know which outside group is really behind those fear-inducing ads, we've got one place to turn; We find that format for the general election debates would be instantly familiar to Dick Nixon and Jack Kennedy; and much more.

With it's last-ditch Night of Facebook Action, the anti-FISA group that was organized to protest Barack Obama's stance on the bill is turning into a case study in "worth a try" activism; Carly Fiorina is on the trail and defending John McCain's tech cred; we take a look at a dust-up over congressional rules on third-party web tools; a Daily Kos diarist pushes back against calls for millenials to take their activism to meat space; and much, much more.

Kentucky bloggers are taking back their state's Democratic Party, one wiki entry at a time.  This week Ben Carter and Joe Sonka, proprietors of the progressive Kentucky blog BlueGrassRoots, announced the creation of BlueGrassWiki.  The project aims to organize information about Kentucky's 120 county parties in order to "infiltrate" local leadership in upcoming party precinct elections.

TechPresident works tirelessly to keep you as informed as possible about the presidential race, and today we’re releasing the latest addition to our info-arsenal, techPresident’s StaffWiki.